UK magazine publishers should be damned for their iPad applications

The best magazine I have ever read was The Face, but even if it was
still published I probably wouldn’t buy an iPad app and it would appear that
most magazine readers have a similar opinion about other existing titles.

For all the furore about the iPad being the saviour of magazines and the future for paid journalism, the market is pitifully small in the UK.* (*see footnote) and there are plenty of reasons why this is unlikely to change for years.

According to a Nielsen survey of 5,000 iPad users released last month, 91% of iPad owners have downloaded an app - and more than 50% have paid for content. Among the top paid apps, however, the magazine sector comes in at a lowly eighth place.

These numbers haven’t prevented magazine publishers in the UK from throwing money at the iPad, including super-brand Vogue, which has been published for nearly a century but this legacy seems to have been lost on its digital team.

The magazine recently launched on the iPad in the UK and its December issue is available as an app for £3.99 and in addition to digital replication of its 300 pages, there are a number of extra video figures that fashionistas are supposed to swoon over and download.

But however beautiful the December issue of Vogue is, the publisher has admitted that the next Vogue app is unlikely to be released until March and it may never publish an iPad edition again. Furthermore, the US and Italian editions of the magazine have decided not to launch iPad editions and to spend their budgets on improving their websites… and they may be right in doing so.

Why create and spend more on an iPad app if it already looks good on the website? Vogue UK’s approach to the iPad isn’t the first mistake of its kind. There was a huge hullabaloo when the Wired app sold more than 100,000 copies when it was launched, but the download itself weighed in at a huge 527 MBs. Magazines will never be an impulse buy when the file size is the size of a full movie download.

And there’s more… over in the US where the market is more developed, marque title Sports Illustrated made its latest iPad edition available in landscape mode only after it decided to slash design and production costs. Anyone trying to read the latest Sports Illustrated in portrait mode will see an error message telling them to flip to landscape instead. This is brand-destructing, not brand-building.

I don’t doubt there is a market here, but publishers need to be more innovative. I like reading Private Eye and while I may not subscribe to it, I always buy it at an airport or railway station. Even so, I don’t find all of it interesting, but I’d certainly be interested in buying an app that gave me a choice of its content to cherry pick.

And this may be where the future lies for companies that publish a stable of magazines. If they produced an app that allowed potential customers to choose content from across all their magazines, a price point of £3.99 would be value for money as we all love personalised content.

What’s more, not only did I love The Face, but I collected The Face, so if the owner of that archive put all of its covers on the iPad, let alone its content, I’d probably pay more than £3.99 for it… and I’d happily accept a finder’s fee for suggesting the idea.